


Moving Forward (But Never On)

by hbxplain



Series: More Lives Than One [5]
Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game), More Lives Than One, Original Work
Genre: AFA's Bad At Planning, Alcohol Mention (1), And Accidentally Lies Her Way Into Being a God, Anla Helps, Deity's Pass, Eronell, Exo Farms, Finnaela Raegan As A God, Finny Cons All of Phandalin, Finny Is Equally Bad At Planning, Finny Panics, Gen, Myastan, Orcshire, Palace Origins, The Ship Crash, Tiefling Tower, Trials Pond, phandalin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-09
Updated: 2020-01-09
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:00:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22185997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hbxplain/pseuds/hbxplain
Summary: How Finnaela fared in the month leading up to her meeting the crew for the first time in the second plane.
Relationships: Anla and Finnaela Raegan
Series: More Lives Than One [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1469825





	Moving Forward (But Never On)

_The ship shudders._

_It rocks, and Finny shoots up into a more alert position. Erdan is alert and checking everything for trouble. Cabhan buckles down. If he liked the gods, he would be praying, but he doesn't. Pariv doesn_ _’t bother to meditate or ask the ancestors for guidance. He just sits there. Just. Sits._

_"It isn't supposed to do that, right?" Finny asks, nervously eyeing the vampiric take button._

_Furia tries to keep the ship on a steady course, looking for a safe place to land._ _“I don’t think so,” she says nervously. She’s trying her best. This should be working. But it’s not._

_Finny glances at them, glances at the button again, and then makes a frustrated noise and falls to the floor to peel off the panel in the wall._

_"I can catch you,_ _” Pariv says, slowly unbuckling his seat belt and partly unfurling his wings._

_But before he can leave his seat, Erdan reaches over Furia. Types in his crew code. Tells the ship to eject its passengers._

_The last thing Finny hears from their group is Pariv saying_ _“Finny, remember the time-?” After that, the wind snatches away Furia’s voice as she shouts Finny’s name._

 _Remember the time-_ _**Reme** _ _mber the t_ _ ime _ _\- Rem_ _**ember** _ _ **th** _ _**e** _ _ **ti** _ _ m _ _e-_

_Remember the time?_

_(She doesn_ _’t.)_

* * *

Finny’s head hurts.

Well, come to think of it… A lot of her hurts, actually. But the more pressing matter as of this very moment _seems_ to be the pile of flaming wreckage she’s under.

Did she pass out? For how long? Never mind. Both of those questions make her head hurt more. Finny tries to move backward, simultaneously reaching up to lift some of the crushing weight off her chest, and then yelps in pain when her arm suddenly feels like death.

For a moment, she thinks of the others—but then she remembers, vaguely, the image of Erdan pushing the eject button. She squeezes her eyes shut and tries the whole moving thing again.

It hurts just as much the second time, but she grits her teeth and keeps going anyhow. By the time she actually makes it out from under the horribly charred metal, her head is spinning, her vision blurring.

She promptly passes out.

* * *

Finny’s head hurts.

Okay, that tracks. She slowly, _slowly,_ sits up, careful not to lean any of her weight on her right arm, and looks drowsily around. She’s only a couple feet away from the ship, which is extremely on fire.

That’s not good, and as much as she fears what will happen if they don’t have a ship, she’s sure it won’t be great for her to be right beside it if and when it blows up, either. So she pulls herself unsteadily to her feet and-

And she limps _towards_ the ship. She’s all kinds of relieved when she notices her elderberry staff, perfectly fine, cradled between two huge sheets of metal. She’s surprised the glass didn’t shatter- but, then again, her friends worked _very_ hard on the whole thing. She smiles to herself. Of _course_ it’s durable.

The same cannot be said for the ship’s glass, which is shattered into tiny pieces that litter the ground around the wreckage. Having gotten what she came for, Finny decides to get the heck away from the whole thing.

The ship crashed right by the edge of a forest—it looks like the far end of Deity’s Pass. She finds the closest tree that’s a safe distance away from the ship, and then she leans heavily against it, trying to breathe and wincing when it’s unnecessarily hard.

But she’s only down 200 hit points, so it’s not a big deal. She’s limping heavily with her left leg, and she can’t move her right arm without feeling like she’s being repeatedly stabbed, and her head feels like it’s underwater, and she can’t keep herself on the same train of thought for more than twenty seconds, and there’s this weird and horrible tugging sensation in her mind-

But she’s only down 200 hit points. So it _can_ _’t_ be a big deal.

Briefly, she wishes she had prepared some healing spells. Jack and Mary had always assured her she wouldn’t need any, but she supposes they didn’t consider what she would do if she got hurt _outside_ of healing the team. Unfortunately, she can’t exactly heal herself _with_ herself.

But there’s not much she can do about that now. _Now,_ she just has to do her best to stay conscious, even as her vision swims and every part of her aches.

The tugging, at least, wears off only a few minutes later. But the rest, Finny is starting to admit, definitely needs some sort of attention. Or, _at least,_ bed rest. But she _can_ _’t_ rest, because- because she has _no clue_ where the rest of her crew landed. They could be anywhere, in any situation! They can’t _take_ as much as she can. And she doesn’t even know if they all landed together, so gods only know if Pariv is close enough to help, if he’s even _alive-_

If he’s conscious, she means. She has to stay _some_ kind of positive, or else she just won’t make it. She just _won_ _’t._

So she decides to just wait until she doesn’t feel like she’s going to fall over after one step. Except she waits for something like ten minutes and it still isn’t any better, so-

So she heads out.

Finny _tries_ to head out. She was so sure she could make it at least a _small_ distance, just in case maybe they landed nearby or something, but… The first thing she does upon leaving the balance of her tree is fall right to the ground. So that’s sure as heck not going to work. She _needs_ to recover somehow. So, as patiently as she can manage with worry for her friends hanging pressingly over her head, she rests back against the tree, sinks to the ground again, and starts trying to recall any healing spells she might have known long ago, before she was told she wouldn’t need them. She tries to recall and-

She falls asleep.

* * *

A day and a half later, she’s at least got ‘cure wounds’ down, and she’s able to move and think like _almost-_ normal. Also a day and a half later, the ship has _not_ exploded, by some strange miracle of luck. Granted, it’s mostly scrap metal now, anyway, but Finnaela is still glad it didn’t explode.

It’s _strange,_ though, because she knows the batteries _would have_ exploded, which leads her to believe they don’t _have_ the batteries anymore. Which is… unfortunate, but she guesses it doesn’t actually make a difference without the ship itself being in one piece.

With the ship no longer scarily on fire, and with Finny no longer heaving for breath and stumbling forward every few feet, Finny decides to try approaching the ship again, this time with much more than just her staff in mind. She wants to take a quick inventory, if possible.

She finds some of the trinkets they each got to decorate their sides of the console with, and smiles to herself as she quietly pockets them. Otherwise, not much has survived—except for, thankfully, their home base spell bundle. It’s meant to build an entire base of operations in the area it’s activated, but… She shakes her head. She shouldn’t choose a place for their home base without the others.

So she looks for the others.

And she cannot find them. She heads west, through Deity’s Pass, and then stops in her tracks when she sees a single well where the AFA building _should_ be. Granted, her plane’s AFA had started out as just a well and a secret room below it. They’d only started building more publicly once the public got invested in their research. So maybe AFA’s not as popular in this plane? Or maybe AFA isn’t even a _thing._

 _That_ _’s_ a weird thought. AFA has been Finny’s whole life for the last four years, and technically that shouldn’t matter because she’s an elf and comparatively four years is not that long, really. But she treasures these last four years so much more than any other part other part of her life, excluding only the small part with Neser in it.

Anyhow, all she sees is a well.

She swings by Tiefling Tower next. It seems roughly the same as she remembers it being in her own plane, but it also seems _occupied,_ so she takes a sharp left and heads toward Exo Farms.

She’d like to teleport, but, knowing that the AFA location is completely different… Frankly, she’s afraid of what she might find. What if she thinks she’s teleporting to Phandalin, and, instead, she finds herself in the middle of an ocean? So she doesn’t teleport. Not yet.

But there’s no sign of her crew in Exo Farms, either, and once she finally makes her way down to Phandalin, there’s no sign of them there, either. She asks around, but no one seems to have any memory of “four people falling out of the sky,” which is kind of all Finny has to go off of.

Someone in Phandalin comments rather snidely on her uniform. She switches tactics, and starts asking people if they recognize it and have seen it on someone else.

Surprisingly, they have, but not in the way Finny was hoping for. She gets told all about the AFA auditions from not too long ago, which Finny doesn’t want to try and parse just yet. Almost every explanation she’s given is ended with a suspicious question about why she’s wearing an AFA uniform.

She teleports back to the crash site.

Once she’s there, in the middle of nowhere, she takes a moment to open her rift and pull out a more casual set of clothes. Probably best she not hang around in a burnt, bloody uniform anyhow. It just… hadn’t occurred to her, what with everything else going on.

At this point, she realizes there are some _other_ things she hasn’t thought about. Food, for one. Without the crew’s cook _or_ hunter—without even the total cop-out of the spell bundle—she’s… kinda screwed. Unless she can get her act together or find someone to teach her that goodberry spell, she’s out of luck. And she’s not even sure her brand of magic could accomplish the goodberry spell.

She rifles through her rift. She notes, a little bitterly, that it is a bit of an oversight on AFA’s part (fine, on _all_ of their parts, she’ll admit) not to send any currency along.

But then she eyes the gachapon tokens, which AFA sent _plenty_ of.

…

She can work with this.

* * *

Finnaela cons the heck out of Phandalin’s entire market district—after, of course, a quick disguise spell. It’s surprisingly fun, and a nice reprieve from the otherwise constant slew of negative emotions.

Once she’s got her resource situation a little more under control, she heads back to the crash site. And, _grudgingly_ _…_

She admits to herself that finding her team might not be as easy as she had hoped.

 _No._ She’s just being negative. She heads off to Trials Pond.

* * *

And promptly changes her mind about that course of action, because a feminine voice echoes smoothly in her head when she approaches the water and she doesn’t want to die before she can find her team. She dips by Orcshire instead.

And _that_ _’s_ a whole different mess, because if her team is in _there_ then it’s sure as _heck_ not going to be easy getting them out. Of course, if they _all_ landed there, or at least a couple of them, she thinks they could handle it—no, she takes it back. She’s fairly sure any one of them could hold their own in Orcshire. She is equally sure, however, that _she_ could not. So if they’re in there, they’ll have to either come to her or wait for her to get way more prepared.

So she switches her direction to that of Eronell. But the hills are fairly devoid of life, excluding the occasional crab or traveling trader. She catches a glimpse of what she believes to be Furia’s old tribe, and, quickly after, the area where she remembers Pariv’s to be—but, from what she’s heard from those two, she doubts she would be welcomed. Anyhow, if they managed to land in their own respective past tribes, then that would be a heck of a stroke of luck, and they shouldn’t have any problem getting out on their own.

If they landed in _each other_ _’s_ tribes, then that could be a problem. Or if Erdan or Cabhan fell there. But the people in Phandalin mentioned AFA auditions, so if it’s even vaguely the same here as it is at home—Finny kind of hopes it is—they should be recognized and spared regardless.

Finnaela teleports back to Phandalin and treks by the Myastan. They’re supposedly at least a _little_ more welcoming than the Argetarocs. Hell, she and her friends had done a Meet the Crew event in their own plane’s Myastan tribe.

…But her crew isn’t there. At this point, she’s not surprised.

* * *

Finny heads back to the crash site, and, with a heavy heart, reassesses the spell bundle.

She would _love_ to wait for her team’s input. But, by now, it’s clear she won’t be finding them anytime soon, and she doesn’t want to waste _too_ many gachapon tokens on conning people, because then she’ll be out of gachapon tokens and she’ll have to make more herself, which is a real pain.

Anyway, this whole ‘finding her team’ thing is certainly turning out to be more of a longform project, so she only feels a _little_ bad when she stands at the edge of the clearing and activates the spell bundle.

Even knowing what’s going to happen, what’s going to be built, she is amazed by the opulence of it all. It seems… a little unnecessary, actually. Especially given what she was working with two seconds ago.

Still, it’s almost comforting, the familiarity of the place she had a very small hand in designing. She walks through the intricate front doors, overlain with her crew’s symbol, and then she pauses.

She backs up and starts mumbling a spell. She’d rather have Neser’s rune right now. AFA doesn’t have to know.

Once she’s happy with her re-creation, she finally walks all the way inside. She sees the magic dining table, the one Cabhan and Pariv enchanted together, and… well, she’s more _confused_ than anything else, really. Why are there so many chairs? Why is one chair more like a _throne_ than a reasonable seat?

She’s curious, and she’s got nothing else to do (she’s got so much else to do but it’s wearing her down _so_ quickly and she just needs to rest-), so she investigates. She finds Jack’s name engraved in calligraphy on the underside of both the chair’s arms.

She laughs for a very long time.

Finny checks out the basement next. It was meant to be their baseline—it had all the important things. Or, rather, what _AFA_ considered important. Their bedrooms, their non-Cabhan food supply, and a million other useful things are all upstairs. But downstairs are their desks, the library, the spare armory, and their training room. AFA had told them that if they needed to be sneaky, they could de-construct the above-ground part of the palace and just use the basement. Finny is just glad for the little reminder of her friends, and she takes a moment to appreciate the little rec-room area they’d snuck into the plans.

She ducks into the library and thumbs through some of the books, hoping for information on the protocol for… losing the entire team. Or being lost by the entire team. She’s not sure which situation she’s actually in.

But it doesn’t matter, because she doesn’t find protocol for either scenario. Seems like an oversight, but there’s nothing she can do about it now.

(It occurs to her that the others _might_ know the protocol, if there is any. Finny didn’t get to focus quite as much on the bookwork and the what-ifs in the last year or so. It was just that damned endurance training.)

Finny ends up going back upstairs and curling up in Jack’s completely unnecessary throne, because she thinks it’s hilarious and honestly she’ll take all the comedy she can get right now. It’s not like she has Cabhan around to lift her spirits with a poorly-timed but consistently funny joke, or Erdan to advise her where to go next. She doesn’t have Pariv around to promise she’ll be okay, and she doesn’t have Furia around to demand her to be.

She cries herself to sleep in Jack’s dumbass throne.

* * *

Finnaela awakes to the sight of two humanoids hovering over her.

Immediately, she scrambles back, but she’s in a goddamn throne so she doesn’t get very far. Towering over her is a large, grey-blue dark elf and a dainty-looking silver-haired human. Behind them, even more intimidating, are a huge, bulky woman with several weapons and full armor, an incredibly tall guy with a beard and a helmet, and a small lady with her hair up in a messy bun.

“Who are you? What are you doing? What is this place? Is it yours? How did you get it?”

They’re all asking questions at once, loud and demanding and- and she panics. She panics and she figforms and she sprints right through them all.

They do a lot of yelling after that because “What the _hell!?_ _”_ and “Uh, _that_ _’s_ not normal!” Finny materializes completely again behind them all, breathing heavily as she tries to get her panic under control, tries to follow Pariv’s breathing patterns, tries to just _think_ for once in her life-

The big scary lady with the self-contained armory draws a battleaxe half as big as Finny herself, and so Finny goes right back into figform, darting _through_ the scary lady and then sliding over the palace-table and popping back on the other side. She’d love to stay figform forever and wait for them to go away, but she doesn’t think they will, and she _won_ _’t_ let them take over the palace. She’s going to need it to find the others.

Hair Bun Woman shouts in alarm and the scary lady throws something that looks big and sharp to Finny’s adrenaline-altered vision, and so Finny huffs and figforms one more time, slipping behind Silver Hair as she approaches and then hopping up to stand on the throne. She may as well make her move now, while these people are confused as all get-out.

“Think,” Finny says, in as commanding a tone as she can manage. It’s the tone she used to use when Neser tried to eat half the cookie jar in one sitting. He was always startled into listening, and then devolved into giggles as she failed to keep up the demanding voice. Now, though, she doesn’t think keeping it up will be any trouble at all. “Think about your actions. You haven’t hit me because you _can_ _’t._ I’m more powerful than you—” (oh, boy, now she’s carrying over into bluff territory) “—and I don’t want to watch you waste your energy.” She pauses, assessing them. They seem shocked into silence, so she takes advantage of that to seem even more in control. _“Speak,_ if you believe you can.”

“Oh,” the Bun Woman finally says. “You’re a _goddess!_ Did you get kicked out of the main pantheon, too?”

Finny narrows her eyes. “… _Yes._ _”_

Dark Elf rolls his eyes. Silver Hair smiles encouragingly.

“Well, what are you the goddess of, then?” asks the scary lady.

And, uh, that’s a problem. What _can_ she be a god of? She cycles through all her knowledge of the gods in _her_ plane. She can’t pick one that… already has a god. Because that could backfire pretty badly. And it should probably be something she can vaguely relate to if she wants to actually pull this off, but she’s not really _good_ at much except crossing wires and she knows there’s a god for that already. A really popular one, too.

She’s starting to panic, she’s been silent for too long; but she catches a glimpse of her ears in the table’s reflection, catches them doing their high elf thing and moving back and forth like they’ve got a mind of their own.

“Goddess of Elven Ancestry,” she says.

“…Huh,” says Scary Lady.

Oh, gods. Finny should’ve said ‘goddess of not-dying,’ or something. That would’ve tracked a lot better, what with her intro to these people being avoiding being hit lots of times, and her hit points being over 400. Damn it. Can’t go back now. Her deception mod is pretty low, so she can’t risk changing her story. She’s got to commit.

“Alright, fine,” Dark Elf says, seeming unamused. Finny fights not to wince. “So you ran from the pantheon. Why’d they kick you out?”

Finny says, with the most honesty she’s had this whole conversation, “Frankly, I wasn’t good for much other than moving my ears around and not getting hit.”

“Wow, what a power set,” Dark Elf grumbles, and Silver Hair elbows him.

“I’m Istus, and I was kicked out for _not_ destroying time,” Silver Hair says, playfully, “after a really important god _really_ wanted me to.

“And I followed her, because I have no sense of self-preservation,” Dark Elf grumbles. Istus whispers that his name is Cyndor.

“I panic too much,” says the Bun Woman—Ansenia, according to Istus—almost apologetically. “I just- so many things could go wrong-”

Scary Lady, who Istus introduces as Kaliber, cuts her off. “I got a little too eager with the whole war thing. Got kicked out after the war of 33Xi.”

Finny raises an eyebrow, taking a chance on this plane’s history. “The one where Orcshire and Phandalin fought each other for about two days before both decided it was too much of a hassle?”

Kaliber shrugs. “I have a short fuse.”

Finny… doesn’t particularly _like_ these people. Not _yet._ Mostly because she just doesn’t trust that quickly, and it’s hard to like someone she’s scared of. But they think she’s a goddess, and that means they think she’s equal, and _that_ means they could be a huge asset to her.

So she invites them to stay.

* * *

While the gods settle in, Finny begins dedicating time to rebuilding the ship from the ground up. She explains this to the other gods as a “longform godly project” that she refuses to elaborate on, because, so far, just adding the word ‘godly’ to things has worked pretty well.

It takes a solid week of her only trancing an hour at a time at _most_ and trying her best not to trance at all. But, honestly, she thinks that’s probably a record. Else, it _would_ be, if ‘rebuilding a high-tech interplanar ship solely from memory and charred metal’ was any sort of reasonable, record-having hobby. Which it isn’t. She assumes.

She builds the whole thing herself with no help from anyone and she’s _proud_ of herself. …Until she realizes that the plane absolutely will not fly without the batteries, which she doesn’t have. She doesn’t know quite what to do about that.

It is also around this time that she realizes they really should have labeled the console buttons a little better. She has no clue what goes where in terms of the ship’s attacks and defenses. She’s got her life drain activation and the basis of the forcefield, and that’s about it.

To get any further, she needs her journal, where she carefully detailed each and every wire. But gods only know where that thing is. Technically she wasn’t even allowed to have it—Mary and Jack were _very_ arrogant about their machinery, and they constantly insisted that Finny would have literally no use in this plane other than to be a not-so-last ditch effort. They’d _hated_ when she made plans for ship backups, or when she tried to study the mechanics of the whole thing.

(Luckily, everyone in her crew hates Jack and Mary at least a little bit, and no one had minded helping her sneak into the hangars just to take the ship apart and put it back together. For science. And Mary painstakingly checked and bragged about each part of the ship every time they had to fly it, so Finny wasn’t concerned about messing up and screwing them over. Heck, she did a second round of checking herself right before they took off for the last time.)

But gods know where her journal is now.

When she’s ready, when she thinks it isn’t suspicious that she’s asking for help, she asks the ‘other’ gods if they know of any… strange happenings. For example, people falling from the sky and-or appearing out of nowhere, or a notebook randomly appearing in the middle of nowhere, or battery-like items popping into existence.

When they question her, she says she’s looking for her “chosen ones,” which they seem to find reasonable enough. But they haven’t a clue as to the answers to her questions—except for Istus, who Finny thinks might know a whole freaking lot—so she goes back to searching, just like in the beginning.

But her efforts keep coming up fruitless, and she ends up stomping aimlessly into a dense forest nearby. Furia would absolutely head for the nearest forest no matter _where_ she landed, right? So it makes sense. Finny’s still on track, she _is,_ she _has_ to be.

She comes across what looks like it could’ve been a temple, once a upon a time, and she’s panicking, she’s panicking _a lot,_ in fact, and it’s been so long since she’s had to deal with her dumbass psyche _alone-_

She realizes she’s spiraling, and she decides to meditate.

And it works, at first. She recalls Pariv’s breathing patterns, tells herself that she’s got time. She’ll find them _soon._ They’re probably fine. They just keep… missing each other. After all, if they’re fine—which they _are_ _—_ they’re probably looking for her, too, right?

Suddenly, Finnaela is interrupted. A blond halfling has wandered into the temple, and, immediately, that halfling startles back, having clearly not expected anyone to be inside. The halfling—a woman—scoffs when she sees Finny, and then starts the conversation with the quiet grumbles of “dirty elf.”

Finny raises an eyebrow. At least if she’s dealing with… whatever this is, she can’t think—as much—about her friends.

The halfling seems pretty unimpressed with Finny’s lack of rebuttal. She stomps up to her, glaring at Finny as she levitates. “Who are you? Why are you here?” she snaps.

“I’m F- _You_ may call me the Goddess Finnaela of Elven Ancestry.”

“Ew,” the halfling spits out, crossing her arms. “What the hell are you doing in this broken-down temple?”

Finny laughs. “I’m meditating. When I’m in a clearer headspace, I can go back to looking for… my chosen ones.”

The halfling seems curious. “…Okay. Fine, I’ll bite. Why are you looking for chosen ones? What will they _do?_ _”_

"They will fix things, I hope," Finny says. "Together, they and I will leave this plane of existence." That was more dramatic than she intended. It’s okay, this halfling seems like she’ll eat it right up.

"Like an elven suicide pact!?"

"Not really," Finny chuckles, shaking her head. "Only two of them are elves. But, in a way... we _will_ let ourselves die to your world."

The halfling narrows her eyes, thinking. Then she nods, a smile growing on her face. “I’m on board with that, yeah. How do I help this happen?”

Finny tilts her head. “You… want to help me? You seem like you don’t like elves.”

“ _Yes,_ thus the helping with the elven suicide pact, dear. Try to keep up.”

Finny snorts. “Yeah, okay. Take my hand.”

Suspiciously, the halfling does, and Finny teleports them both back to the palace.

Finny learns the halfling’s name is Anla, and Anla, surprisingly, becomes very loyal very fast. Finny’s pretty sure it doesn’t take her all that long to realize Finny’s not a god. That said, Anla never tells the other gods about it, and Finny appreciates that.

* * *

Finny’s not making any progress.

Looking just isn’t _doing_ it, there are too many people in the world to reasonably be able to find just four. Desperate, Finny ends up in the ship, staring at the mostly useless console and wondering just how much technology and magic can mix.

A lot, probably.

Finny digs through all her pockets till she comes up with the handful of trinkets she pulled out of the wreckage on the day of the crash. She’s got Cabhan’s little turtle thing, and his picture of Evanaelica. She can probably recreate Furia’s markings on paper to use as a focus. As for Erdan, she thinks her best bet is to just draw a lot of crescent moons and maybe even pray to Corellon. For Pariv, she’s got a scale of his he gave her for the sake of bond magic, which is actually perfect because it’s specifically made by him to amplify magic.

She brings all these things onto the ship and lays them out across the console. Then she plants her staff through the hole where she had previously installed a button, and she flips on every switch she can see, and there isn’t much power for the ship to draw from so she flips on the vampiric take switch, too, and grits her teeth as it draws her life right out of her. She’s so focused on keeping her staff connected that she almost fails to flip the switch _back,_ and she’s on her knees by the time the ship finally has a little bit of power.

She grabs the edge of the console and drags herself back up, and then she sets Cabhan’s turtle beside the staff and she tries to think about her magic instead of the two hit points she has left. The elderberries in the staff’s orb begin to glow slightly, and she takes a breath to center herself as she thinks of Cabhan and stares into the orb.

Slowly, it begins to form an image.

* * *

It takes a while for Finny to locate the others, because she has to recover between each attempt. At first, she’s impatient, but then she tries to do the spell on half health and she can’t flip the switch in time and she passes out and she’s only alive because Anla had tagged along to see the ship.

“You can’t _kill_ yourself for them, Finnaela!” Anla had yelled. She was very angry.

“Yes, I can,” Finny had insisted, but she admitted she couldn’t find them all if she wasn’t alive.

So after that she takes her time. She sees Cabhan—who is _with_ Erdan, by the way, which is _so_ convenient and she’s _so_ glad they’ve had each other all this time—and then she sees Furia, and then she sees Pariv, and she’s- she’s so damn _happy._ It’s the first time she’s seen her crew—her _family_ _—_ in a little under a month, and this month has felt so _long_ and so _hopeless._

But she’s found them.

And she’s ecstatic.

And then she realizes Pariv doesn’t have his wings.

That’s… _confusing._ Why doesn’t he have his wings? Did he _lose_ them? Gods, Finny can’t _imagine_ how much that must’ve hurt- What kind of situation must he have been in to have _lost his wings?_

And then Finny realizes that they’re _all_ different. For some of them, it’s more subtle, but- They’ve _changed,_ and Finny doesn’t know _why._ And it’s a _lot_ of change, too, and all in less than a month! And it doesn’t seem like they’ve moved forward, even, which is odd. It seems like they’ve moved _backward._

Oh, gods.

* * *

While Finny thinks about how the hell she’s going to get all her crew in the same place, or how the hell she’s going to get them to listen to her, or how the hell she’s going to _teach Furia how to fly a planar ship,_ Anla gives Finny updates.

The most consistent of these updates is the army one. Anla constantly tells Finny about her army project, how it’s growing so much so fast. Finny doesn’t know _why_ she’s doing this, but she has an idea that it’s just… something for her to do. Anla likes to have a goal, and Finny doesn’t often give her one.

“I like to accomplish things,” Anla tells her one time. “I… Don’t tell anyone this or I’ll bury you. But I… didn’t have the best luck with my family in the past. They didn’t give me a chance to prove myself, and so they all thought I was worthless, right up until the day they died. And it feels… It feels fitting, when I accomplish things. Fitting for them to have been wrong.”

“Oh,” says Finny, because Anla doesn’t typically share this much. “You- Anla, you shouldn’t have _had_ to prove yourself. That isn’t how families work.”

Anla raises her eyebrows.

So Finny continues. “I- Well, I suppose I didn’t have the best family either, at first. But I- I _met_ my family, much later in life. A new family. And they…” She sighs. “You’re supposed to feel safe with them, Anla. You’re supposed to feel like they would never give up on you.”

Anla’s quiet.

“Huh,” she finally says. “Is it- You were talking about your chosen, right?”

Finny flushes. Sometimes she forgets a couple of her lies. “Oh, uh- yes, you’re right. And- And my son, too.”

“You have a son?” Anla asks, her eyes widening.

“Had,” Finny gently corrects her. “His name was Neser, and he… he was…”

“Boring,” Anla says, but her eyes are piercing, and Finny is just glad she wasn’t able to get too deep into a conversation she knows she couldn’t have finished. “Oh, hey, by the way. I’ve been hearing some rumors around the army about a magical book appearing in Tiefling Tower. It’s being guarded by a few Tiefling hoarders, but it’s there. Could be the book you were looking for.”

“Oh!” Finny says, sitting up a little straighter. “Anla, thank you! I… I don’t have time to go get it right now. But _thank_ you, really.”

Anla smiles and leaves the room.

* * *

Finny is unsure what to do.

The more she watches the crew, the more it becomes totally clear that they don’t remember AFA. And if they don’t remember AFA, then they don’t remember her.

And that didn’t click at first. But now that it has, it is _crushing._

But she’ll make do. Granted, she can’t _continue_ the mission if they don’t remember, but she can at least try to get them home. And, hey, maybe that’ll help! Maybe returning to their home plane will restore their memories. And even if it doesn’t, they’ve got- well, they’ve got-

It occurs to her that they really only had each other back home. Finny was not an outlier in their group.

Even so, they can’t stay here. It feels _wrong_ to be here, it feels unsteady. And Cyndor is constantly giving her these nasty glares, like he wants her to _hurry it up_ _—_ and, knowing that he is the god of continuity, she finds herself a little concerned by this. Plus, every time Finny talks about finding her chosen, Istus gives her this encouraging smile, and Finny’s not sure how much she _knows,_ but-

She just needs to get her crew home.

Soon, Finny realizes that everyone in the crew seems to be heading, unknowingly, for the same city. It’s only a little south of Phandalin, and this is the first time they’ll have been near each other since Finny was able to track them. Excitedly, she asks Anla to go fetch them, simply because Finny knows she herself will just run her mouth like an idiot and forget they’ve forgotten and then they might not listen to her at _all_ and oh gods this is stressful.

And then Anla takes… longer than expected.

And, fine, Finny figures that tracks pretty well, because everyone in her crew is a stubborn little shit, herself included. But when Anla _does_ arrive back at the palace, it becomes clear that her main reason for taking so long was not because of the crew’s pigheadedness.

It was because she found Neser.

Finnaela doesn’t know how to feel about that at _all._ Mostly, she feels pretty damn bad about it. But Neser lights up when he sees her, asks her where she went, why she left, why it took so long to come back and- and Finny doesn’t know. She doesn’t know what happened to the Finny of this plane, she doesn’t know what happened to Neser after he apparently did not die, she doesn’t know how she’s supposed to _respond-_

She tells herself she won’t get attached, but she hugs him all the same.

* * *

Anla tells her that the crew took a nap on the journey here, and that her army has dropped them off in the little side room, the one that’s all white for some reason. Finny’s never liked that room. She wishes Mary would have let them do more for the interior design.

But, frankly, that doesn’t matter now. Finny is just… _nervous._ And it’s _weird,_ because she’s _never_ nervous around them—not like this, anyway. In fact, when she’s around them is about the only time she’s ever _confident._

So Finny is nervous, but she’s also _thrilled,_ because holy gods, she gets to _see_ them! She gets to talk to them, in person! She gets to _not be alone anymore!_

She’s on the second floor of the palace, unclasping her staff from the ship’s console, when Anla suddenly runs up to the door and yells, “They’re awake! I gave them wine!”

“What? _Why!?_ _”_ Finny asks, suddenly very unprepared.

“I don’t know!” Anla says, clearly panicking a little herself. “It’s the home-brewed elven stuff you like, to teach them Elvish!”

“ _Why!?”_

“ _I don’t know, I panicked!”_

Finny wants to question her more, but she’s too excited. She just wants to _see_ them again. Anla darts back downstairs, heading for their room to guide them out to the dining hall, and Finny is about to start down the stairs when she suddenly freezes.

Anla’s guiding them to the dining hall.

 _Because they don_ _’t know how to find it._

They’ve _forgotten,_ forgotten _everything,_ and it’s finally clicking for Finny that she’s _not prepared_ for that. She’s- She’s going to have to lie to them. She’s going to have to pull the same “goddess” bullshit she pulled with Anla and the gods, because there’s _no way_ the old Pariv and Furia and Erdan and Cabhan—well, Pariv might, actually—there’s no way they’d listen to a stranger. There’s _no way_ she could walk up to them and say ‘trust me.’

She could ask them to trust her a million times.

They never would.

So when she finally walks down that fancy staircase, she’s _frazzled._ She’s _scared._ She doesn’t know how far to take this, she doesn’t know if she can take it at _all._ She’s overflowing with anxiety and regret and she’s so, so sad.

But then she sees them.

“I am Finnaela,” she says. Her smile grows uncontrollably as she adds, “But you can call me Finny.”


End file.
